Kevin Bronson on March 4th, 2011

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Voxhaul Broadcast frontman David Dennis describes his band’s music as being “a lot about searching and even more about finding,” but it’s also about getting it right.

When the L.A. quartet with the quirky, Morrissey-referencing name first emerged from Orange County four years ago with an EP on the incubator label Retone Records, they were motivated but rough around the edges, emotional if a bit inscrutable. Since then, Dennis and bandmates Anthony Aguiar, Phillip Munsey II and Kurt Allen have turned their live show into something electric, recorded an album, shelved it, wrote dozens of new songs and, finally, completed their debut, “Timing Is Everything.”

The album, made with producer Tom Biller (who’s worked on records by the likes of Warpaint, Liars, Silversun Pickups, Sea Wolf and Irving), is proof that perseverance pays off. “Timing Is Everything” mixes fuzzy indie-rock with ’60s-leaning rock ’n’ soul and brings it to a boil, with Dennis’ big vocals and Aguiar’s prickly guitars trading punches on a canvas of classic-rock rhythms.

There’s quit a bit of sonic breadth over the album’s 13 tracks. “We’ve been playing together so long now,” Dennis says, “we kind of do whatever works for us, and the song, although we like to think there’s a thread running through everything.”

Thematically, that applies too. The album’s emotional restlessness speaks to Dennis’ itinerant childhood as a missionary’s son, as well as the teenage years spent in southern Orange County, surrounded musically by a lot of hardcore bands, thinking, he says, “there had to be more.

“It sounds funny, but when we moved up to L.A., we gave up a lot of small-town dreams. The things that we knew would make us comfortable, we had to leave behind. I think you can get some of that in the lyrics … the searching, the finding. There’s a lot of lost and found.”

They spent a certain amount of time in L.A. as fish out of water. “We kept recording and recording, but we’d never have a game plan,” Dennis says. “Everything – working in the studio, playing live, the business side – has been a learning process.”

Recent developments have bidden well for Voxhaul. Former KCRW music director Nic Harcourt (now helming The LiveBuzz) tabbed the quartet as a band to watch in the L.A. Times Magazine’s music issue last year, and the band’s songs have rocked movie trailers, TV shows and a national beer commercial featuring Lance Armstrong.

With the arrival of their self-released album (due out March 22), Dennis says the umbilical cord to the band’s developmental phase has been cut. “I haven’t lost sleep over it, but I’m really eager to get the album out. It’s not that [the album] is necessarily this epic thing that represents everything we’re about, but I want people to know where we’re at.”

Photo by Whitney Gibson

||| Download: “Leaving on the 5th”

||| Live: Voxhaul Broadcast headlines the Local Folk Fest on Saturday at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts. The quartet also several shows at SXSW, including the Buzz Bands LA Austin 2011 Showcase on Wednesday, March 16, at Cedar Street Courtyard.

||| Stream: The whole album via Spotify